Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

NOTED WITH PLEASURE

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

How does it feel to fall out of an airplane? In ''The Satanic Verses'' (Viking) Salman Rushdie describes two Indians plummeting through a fantasy of demonology.

When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's, to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body. Overalls by Cezanne

Perhaps James Agee was the only writer who could compare the blue of a sharecropper's worn overalls to ''some of the blues of Cezanne'' - and get away with it. This is from a new edition of ''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'' (Houghton Mifflin).

The structures sag. . . . The edges of the thigh pockets become stretched and lie open, fluted, like the gills of a fish. The bright seams lose their whiteness and are lines and ridges. The whole fabric is shrunken to size, which was bought large. The whole shape, texture, color, finally substance, all are changed. The shape, particularly along the urgent frontage of the thighs, so that the whole structure of the knee and musculature of the thigh is sculptured there. . . . The texture and the color change in union, by sweat, sun, laundering, between the steady pressures of its use and age: both, at length, into realms of fine softness and marvel of draping and velvet plays of light which chamois and silk can only suggest, not touch; and into a region and scale of blues, subtle, delicious, and deft beyond what I have ever seen elsewhere approached except in rare skies, the smoky light some days are filmed with, and some of the blues of Cezanne. A Wildness of Real Estate

Nothing is so much fun for a writer as talking about painting, because here he can throw off all his familiar disciplines and write recklessly, say almost anything. This is Leonard Michaels admiring Wayne Thiebaud in ''Writers on Artists,'' edited by Daniel Halpern (North Point).

In England it is said one lives ''in'' a street. Americans say one lives ''on'' a street, as a town is built on a river, beside-and-separate-from the flow. The English preposition keeps the idea of street as a way, a flow of traffic ''in'' which one lives, as if there were no strict boundary between the privacy of homes and the public place. Thiebaud's streets are also ways, but they are full of force and direction, a wildness shooting through real estate. Seeing his streets for the first time, if you know San Francisco, is shocking. You realize that you'd never truly seen the city before.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In contrast, consider New York's streets, how nothing they contain isn't qualified by others seeing it. In those streets, there is an oppressive intimacy and utter impersonality at once. Everything you see is already seen by millions upon millions of others, and whatever is, is as others see it. Though not exactly old, New York feels ancient, European, deeply known as well as knowing. Its streets mean sidewalks, no fancy intuitions, just concrete beaten dead by the passage of peoples. Hearth With Cats and Hens

The bleak landscape of Wales is almost irresistible to a poet - especially one who, like R. S. Thomas, is also a clergyman. This is his poem ''Hireling'' in the anthology ''Poetry With an Edge,'' edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe/Dufour Editions). Cars pass him by; he'll never own one. Men won't believe in him for this. Let them come into the hills And meet him wandering a road, Fenced with rain, as I have now; The wind feathering his hair; The sky's ruins, gutted with fire Of the late sun, smouldering still. Nothing is his, neither the land Nor the land's flocks. Hired to live On hills too lonely, sharing his hearth With cats and hens, he has lost all Property but the grey ice Of a face splintered by life's stone. Macho in Marble

According to Peter Brown, the Roman men we often refer to as ''noble'' suffered from anxiety about their masculinity. This is from ''The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity'' (Columbia University).

As Galen suggested, in his treatise On the Seed, lack of heat from childhood on could cause the male body to collapse back into a state of primary undifferentiation. No normal man might actually become a woman; but each man trembled forever on the brink of becoming ''womanish.'' His flickering heat was an uncertain force. . . . It was never enough to be male: a man had to strive to remain ''virile.'' He had to learn to exclude from his character and from the poise and temper of his body all telltale traces of ''softness.'' . . . The small-town notables of the second century watched each other with hard, clear eyes. They noted a man's walk. They reacted to the rhythms of his speech. They listened attentively to the telltale resonance of his voice. Any of these might betray the ominous loss of a hot, high-spirited momentum, a flagging of the clear-cut self-restraint, and a relaxing of the taut elegance of voice and gesture that made a man a man.

A version of this article appears in print on February 26, 1989, on Page 7007047 of the National edition with the headline: NOTED WITH PLEASURE. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe